Improved privacy settings for our Photo Gallery

Happy news...

Some people, including myself, were dismayed to learn that the contents of the photo galleries were being indexed by Google and were thus appearing in searches that had little to do with our purpose in having a website. That is to say, we were concerned about attracting the wrong kind of attention.

I wrote my own letters to SmugMug, and encouraged others to send them Email as well to politely request more control over the privacy settings.

SmugMug listened, and they have added a feature to customize the permissions that affect the google search engine.

There are three options:

Hello World!, which means Yes Google will index everything.

Home Page only, which means Google will index the home page, but not the galleries or their contents.

No, which mean that Google is asked not to index anything.

Once I became of the new feature, I changed the setting to "Home Page Only" which will allow those who are legitimately looking to find the site based on the words I use on my home page, but not the contents and captions of all the galleries.

It will take as much as a week for Google to get the gist of this and "unindex" the pages they already found, such as the ones some of you mentioned to me previously. This is an excellent addition to the SmugMug service.

Previously, I would have had to 1) delete the gallery, 2) Recreate the gallery from scratch and make it private by using a password, and 3)Block others from linking to the gallery, which also prevents me from using the images on the website. These settings would have made the galleries all but unusable for our less technical family members, and extremely inconvenient for everyone else.

So, it was previously an all or nothing proposition, so I adopted a wait and see approach and started sending in feature requests for more control over privacy. They listened, and now we shall see how well Google also respects the new settings.

In a week or so, rerun that search for your relatives name and see if it still comes up.

: Joseph William Carpenter
: Albuquerque, NM